Vintage Scalextric

Scalextric is a brand of slot car first release in 1960. Slot cars are toy cars that run along a slot or groove set into a track. Scalextric slot cars are scaled down versions of real cars, driven by electrical motors, along a groove in a plastic track. They have a 'gun' with a trigger that controls the speed of the cars along the track. Scalextric produces a series of cars, tracks and accessories each year and has done since 1960, meaning there are some awesome vintage Scalextric sets out there to collect.

Scalextric was started in 1957 as a brand of Minmodels LTD. Their inventor Mr B Fancis first showed them in 1957 at the Harrogate Toy Fair. They were so popular that they failed to meet the consumer demand so on sold the brand to Lines Bros Limited as they had a better plastics technology. As  time went on the company collapsed and Scalextric was sold onto the UK company Hornby Railways who owns the brand today.

How Scalextric sets work is actually quite simple. Electrical power runs small motors in each car that drive the tires and hence the car around the track. Each car gets their power not by batteries but from the track. The slots in the track that the car drives along have two metal strips running along each side of the slot. The metal on one side has a positive Voltage and the other side a negative voltage. Each car has two metal brushes that make contact with the metal on each side of the slot completing the circuit and powering the motor. So yes, when they come off the track they lose their power, but that’s part of the joy and challenge of slot cars!

Now just having them run around the track at one speed is pretty boring, you need to be able to adjust the speed to inject in the fun and challenge. That is where the controller guns come in. The power from the wall before it gets to the track and car runs through the controller guns. Each gun has a variable resistor in it (which controls the amount of power that gets through). When the trigger is pressed all the way in all the power goes through to the car and they go faster and as you release the trigger less and less power goes through and the car goes slower. And yes, they have no breaks, just different amounts of speed, another part of the challenge of Scalextric. How it works now is the same as it worked with the Vintage Scalextric sets.

Inevitably when things that originally provided excitement and a following of people grow older they not only increase in value but in more and more zealoted following. Vintage Scalextric are defiantly no exception, in fact they are more so than normal. My personal feeling is to why Scalextric has such are large following with more value attached to them is that they are a combination of many other valuable fun vintage items: vintage cars (need I say more); Toys (again need I say more) and not just any toys but tin toys, bonus points; 60's and 70's stuff; old electronics, that you can tinker with - bonus points again; and last but not least anyone who touches these get an instance warm flash back to childhood memories for most people, and usually Christmas’s or birthday in which you are breaking into it for the first time.

Here's a look at one of our favourites: